Projekt Wolfenstahl

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Random thoughts

We're currently in the middle of implementing the fighting system and stuff.
Maybe, if nothing bad happens in the upcoming days we can show some ingame screenshots this weekend.
But I can't promise that...

So, what I wanted to talk about today is the pros and cons of implementing more than one character into the game.
I guess I should point out, that I can't say for sure if we implement another character or not.
At least not at this point during game developement.
(still I thought it would be better to talk about this stuff instead of not doing any blogpost at all)

This means, that this whole topic is PURELY theoretical, no promisses, no guarantees.

Anyway, lets get to the pros and cons.

Pro:
- different characters would mean different gameplay possibilities
- more hentai content
- higher chance that a player would find a character that appeals to them

Con:
- considerably more work (which means "more cost")
- doesn't guarantee that the difference between income (sales) and expenses (work time) balances out
- if done wrong, the workload could "explode" without having a great impact on the content

Possible solutions:
- the hentai content per character could be limited
- crowdfunding via offbeatr (to add more characters to the game)
- careful planning of the implementation of new characters

So, lets go more into the details:

Cres is currently practising animation of the CGs, which means we won't include "CG scenes" (several pictures with variations) but we would include animated CGs (with voice acting).
We thought about giving each of the bosses their own animated CG that appears when the heroine goes game over, as well as giving each "Stage" one animated game over CG.
Giving every enemy their own CG is out of the question, since the workload would explode, even with one playable character alone.

To compensate for that, we came up with a different plan, that "should" work... at least in theory...
According to this plan, we do ingame-grab-animated CGs (yes.... you heard right... and I hope we didn't underestimated the workload...).
But! There's one thing to it...
There will only be 3 different poses for the heroine that get used over and over again.
Each enemy will only get 1 animation, and yes... the good thing is, those 3 poses need to be only drawn (and animated) once, and then the enemy (tentacles or whatever) gets swapped out on each scene.

So it's basically 3 animations, just with swapped out enemies.
That might sound lame...
But that's actually the most cost-effective approach I could come up with, and hey!
It's high-rez animated CGs!

At least in theory this should work out, without being too much work.
Can't promise that this will really work out as intended, but that's the plan, and I believe that it will work.
We will find out in the upcoming weeks, if this really works out.

With this methode, we should be able to maximize the amount of hentai content with as less "extra work" as possible.
And this means, that we could include more playable characters later on.

Offbeatr:

I can't say for sure if we really do this, but there are several things that actually support the possibility of using offbeatr.
First of all, a lot of people stated that they can't use DLSite to buy the games we make.
But as some of you know, we can't do our own "shop" for reasons I've stated about 100 times already in the past.
(so lets skip that)

So actually the only other "legal" way to "sell" the game, would be offbeatr.
And that's a huge plus for offbeatr.

Second, we could use offbeatr to collect money in order to implement more characters.
The game would be a "full" hentai game with only one playable character, but having more characters is always a nice thing.There's just no guarantee that this extra work would pay off... well, with offbeatr we could kinda "avoid" this risk, since we can actually see if people are interested in the game, and we can also see how much "worth" they think it is.

Third, offbeatr charges less money than DLSite.
If I'm not mistaken, offbeatr takes about 30% of the money, while DLSite actually takes 50% or more.(officially DLSite takes a minimum of 45%, but actually they take 50% by giving you less money via slightly cheating with the YEN <--> USD exchange rates...)

Anyway, as you can see there's some high chances that we will be using offbeatr sooner or later.
Most likely once the game is done (or nearly done), so we can also offer a playable demo-version that depicts the gameplay and hentai content "as is".
Coupled with instant-access after the crowdfunding campaign is done.
This also means, that we will go with a funding goal of 500 $ (or whatever is the lowest goal possible), and yeah... since the game will be done (or nearly done) it's of course "guaranteed" that we deliver it.

In this case, there will only be stretch-goals for the implementation of more characters.
(at this point I think there will be no other extras, just new characters, nothing more)
Well, the new characters themselves should be enough "extra content", since they'll have their own animated CGs, and they all play differently from each other.

Whatever, this is just purely theoretical stuff, but this is what we actually planned to do.
High chances that this will work out, but we can't guarantee that things will work out this way.
(there's always something happening that requires to change stuff... I just hope no "radical" changes are necessary)

Hopefully we can show some ingame screenshots this weekend!
We're trying our best to get stuff done til then.

i bought your games on the english version of dlsite and frankly if a choice has to be made i would prefer if you kept selling your games there,the ideal however would be to have your games available for purchase on both offbeatr and dlsite.